PEACE & LIGHT

College Apps for All

VANESSA SALAZAR, A10, knows as well as anyone how effective Let’s Get Ready—the free college counseling and SAT prep program aimed at low-income populations—can be: it helped her get into Tufts. So in 2008, when she founded a Tufts chapter of Let’s Get Ready, she was excited. Four years later, it’s clear that she had every reason to be. Participating students from neighboring Somerville have gained real college admissions savvy, in addition to boosting their SAT scores by an average of 115 points. Currently a graduate student in political science at Fordham University, Salazar continues to urge kids who need a leg up to take advantage of the resource that helped her so much. “The great thing about Let’s Get Ready is that it’s students helping students,” she told an interviewer on the WNBC (New York City) Nightly News in December. The connection is personal, she says, so much so that the program becomes like a family.